Abstract Body

Telepsychiatry, or the delivery of healthcare and the exchange of health care information for purposes of providing psychiatric services across distances, has been increasingly popular among hospitals and private mental health professionals recently, thanks largely to the Covid-19 pandemic. As the service users and the society as a whole have become more knowledgeable about technology, we have an unique opportunity to help services like telepsychiatry to flourish in the coming days.

However, the transition from in person to online consultations is not without challenges. Issues about logistics for conducting consultations and more importantly saving the data, the inability of a select group to use the online portals (digital illiteracy) , the lack of a robust mechanism to avoid breach of confidentiality and safety, medicolegal issues such as informed consent and prescription of certain psychotropics in the digital media and especially, limited acceptance of online consultations as “real” consultations by therapists as well as patients, seem to be major hindrances to an effective telepsychiatry service during COVID 19 pandemic.

In this presentation, we shall look at opportunities along with the challenges of telepsychiatry during and after the COVID 19 pandemic in detail, shed light on the existing guidelines and recommendations from around the world and conduct a general discussion on how these recommendations can be adapted further to the local context in order to establish and sustain an efficient tele-psychiatric service.